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sorry for the ladies. They weren’t interested in Louise, and why should they be? They just wanted to have a look at everything. I decided that when I got married they could.
    After what seemed hours of such fraternizing I decided to launch out on my own and see if I could find Tony. Before I did I inadvertently got mixed up in a conversation with Stephen, who approached me with a vacant, spindly walk and said:
    ‘Well, how do you like being my sister-in-law?’
    I gave this meaningless question as little attention as it deserved, and countered it with, ‘Surely you’re not drinking orange juice on your wedding day?’
    ‘You know quite well,’ he said, ‘that I never drink. I’ve told you before that I don’t like it, but you don’t seem to believe me. You even accused me of affectation last time.’
    ‘Did I really?’
    ‘Yes, you did. And I must say that I am strongly inclined to believe that it is as much through affectation that you indulge.’
    ‘Oh, you’re quite wrong,’ I said. ‘I love it.’
    ‘I think a lot of nonsense is talked about drink,’ he said.
    ‘Perhaps. But that doesn’t mean it isn’t nice. And I mean to say, whoever heard of a novelist who didn’t drink?’
    ‘You must have a very romantic conception of the artist. Penniless and bearded in his garret, you see him?’
    ‘More or less, I suppose I do. Anyway I believe in extremes, don’t you?’
    ‘No no, the well-observed norm, that is what art is about. The delicacy of the perception will compensate for any lack of violence.’
    I think he was quoting from one of his reviews.
    ‘Oh yes,’ I said. ‘Well, I just don’t believe that, I’m afraid.’
    ‘Well, you may find you are wrong,’ he said, with a superior kind of look. I hate anyone to be didactic except me. I was just looking for some retort when I caught sight of Tony’s wife Gill, and immediately disengaged myself from that totally profitless encounter. Stephen can’t be such a fool as he seems. But he certainly has a lot of seeming to account for.
    ‘Excuse me,’ I said, ‘I see an old Oxford friend I haven’t seen for years, excuse me.’
    Not very elegant, but I got away. It wasn’t in fact literally years since I had seen Gill: it was more like nine months. She had been up the year before me, and so had been down for over a year now. She and Tony had got married the minute she left the Porter’s Lodge, more or less, at the end of her last term, and had since then been living in a flat on the King’s Road. I liked them both more than almost anyone; Gill and I had been almost intimate. Not quite—the gap of one year does make some difference even at university level. Also she is basically very unlike me, much more generous and obvious and unselfconscious. With no twists, or so I thought at Louise’s wedding. Tony had plenty of twists, but of the sort that to me seemed like the straight and narrow.
    She was talking to some Chelsea-type lady of Louise’s own past, and when she saw me she broke off what she was saying at once and said, ‘Sarah, how
super
to see you.’
    ‘How super to see
you
,’ I said, inanely and happily: we stood gaping and grinning at each other, trying to think of some way to get going together again. Not painfully trying, but trying. She looked much tidier than she ever used to, I noticed: she used to be a great one for home-made dresses made of hessian and painted by herself in large bold flowers, but now she was wearing a neat grey outfit that I guessed was a Young Jaeger number. Her hair was up, too, very carefully up, in a nice yellow dome.
    It was she who first thought of anything to say. All this avoiding of the weather has its points, with certain people at least.
    ‘I was thinking,’ she said, ‘of that wedding we watched in that church in Milan, where we went to look at the frescoes. What was it called?’
    ‘I can’t remember,’ I said. ‘The
Guide Bleu
stopped at Florence. San Bartolomeo, was it, or San